How can I improve the performance of Visual Studio on a slow hard drive?
I currently have a laptop with a 5400 rpm drive. It has visual studio installed, and while it's okay to work, I've read a lot of places that you can get a pretty good performance boost from VS just by increasing your movement speed.
I don't have that luxury, but I was wondering if I could get some benefit from saving my visual studio projects to an external USB or FireWire drive and load them there rather than from the internal drive.
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USB disk protocols have terrible performance . I have a 3.5 '' SATA drive that gives me 80MB / s read speed when installed in my case. The same drive gives me about 30MB / s when in an external USB enclosure. The limiting factor is the protocol , which can only provide about half of the 480 Mbps you might expect. (I have this from a guy who writes USB stacks for life.) I would suggest that you take a disk and measure to see if you have any noticeable improvement.
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If you are using Windows Vista, you can try using ReadyBoost with a USB flash drive to see if your VisualStudio improves performance.
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Replacing a laptop hard drive is cheap and fast, and with Windows Home Server, you can restore a backup of a new drive.
Even if it's for work, I still think it's worth spending my own money to improve my productivity if my employer doesn't pay for it. (Or find an employer who will!)
The maximum amount of RAM. This will reduce the load on the hard drive.
After you have a lot of RAM, experiment with disabling virtual memory (aka swap space / aka page file). For some usage patterns, this can be much faster. For others, it may be slower. For others, it will be a wreck. Hence, experiment (and save often).
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From some quick data, I found that it doesn't look like you would be better off with a usb 2.0 drive with a 5400rpm internal hard drive.
internal hard drive performance
however, I think one of the faster FireWire drivers might help a little.
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You don't have the option to use a 1394 drive, but I know that an external USB drive is slower than an internal drive.
For a large copy of a file, a USB stick usually has a performance of around 20MB / s and should be worse for handling small files (most of the files in a vs .net project are small).
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A USB stick won't help you as it is slower than an internal drive. If your laptop has an E-Sata port, this disk might be useful. http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_throttle_esata_flash_drive
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You might be better off with an internal drive. If you have sufficient computer memory, access to the hard drive can be cached in physical memory rather than on the hard drive.
It might be possible to prevent windows from being automatically updated to write to disk if the file changes, but that might not be safe on a laptop.
If you have the ability to build in parallel, setting the number of parallel processes to 1 +, the number of cpu cores will allow the cpu (compilation) to be used when another file is loaded.